Are Your Customers as Loyal as a Black Lab?

Interesting and little-understood fact: you're never going to achieve that elusive fifth star of customer service Nirvana by giving flawless service at all times. ...Which is good, since we humans will never be perfect, no matter how relentlessly we try.

No, five-star customer service is earned in the crucible of recovering the dropped ball. Your staff screws up, and someone - that staffer, her manager, maybe even the Chairman - makes amends. A disgruntled customer is won back around, so impressed by your efforts and sincerity that she turns from "satisfied" or even "happy" to "Labrador-loyal."

As you might imagine, I've collected some phenomenal five-star customer service-recovery stories in my lifetime, especially over the past five years or so. Here are just a few:

* "The Immaculate Recall" that catapulted Lexus from an industry joke to the leader in the luxury car class.

* The time Nordstrom gave a "customer" a refund on his tires, despite the fact that Nordstrom has never sold tires.

* The time a JetBlue ticket agent bought over $100,000 of tickets for his passengers on another airline when the flight he was working was canceled.

These are all great examples of what they call "heroics" at Nordstrom - going way above and beyond to make sure the customer isn't merely satisfied, not just happy, but so stunned by your service recovery that she'll be talking about your brand to strangers twenty years from now.

Seriously.

Taken in any type of a short-term perspective, most heroics are just plain dumb business decisions. You can't operate a company like that. Not if you expect to be around for very long, anyway.

...So don't think short-term. Forget about counting trees, and get to looking after your forest. If you're an executive, a business leader, and you're obsessed with short-term numbers, with feasibility, with what you can and - especially - what you can't do, well then you aren't very savvy, are you? Indeed, you aren't much of a leader.

Here then, without further ado, is my new favorite heroic - this time from Patagonia, in Japan.

I'm quoting founder and owner Yvon Chouinard's book Let My People Go Surfing, the education of a reluctant businessman (p. 132). If you haven't read it, read it.

Writes Chouinard,

"Our model for customer service is the old-fashioned hardware store owner who knows his tools and what they're made for. His idea of service is to wait on a customer until the customer finds the right widget for the job, no matter how long it takes. At the other end of the spectrum is the employee who doesn't follow through, as the letter quoted below illustrates. It came from our manager in Japan in 1989 as an explanation of the lengths he had to go to in order to make up for bad service by one of his employees.

'A woman did request our catalog and paid 600 Yen ($4.00 US) to us, but Patagonia Japan staff lost her address and phone number in messy desk and office. After two weeks husband of woman made phone call and he was so angry like volcano. He entirely refused excuse of staff. He needed talk-fight with Mr. Responsibility of Patagonia Japan. He said, "You guys lie, just take money and never send catalog. Hey, this is your way? I am working legally to stop your business with the public facility." I decided to take train to Tokyo from Yokohama to hand catalog and apologize directly to him. However, volcano-angry customer additionally said, "Even if you come to me and my wife I will never stop to kill your business." At his home, he needed my begging head on the floor (this is biggest humility of Samurai). The customer was impressed with my behavior and he said, "Thank you for your delivery and your mind." There are not so many customer like this in Japan, but he is not special type of Japanese customer, he is pretty usual customer if problem happened.' - Katsumi Fujikura

I think I know exactly why "There are not so many customer like this in Japan." If your "pretty usual" customers were so passionate and "volcano-angry" that service recovery inspired your top manager in the country to ride a train for two hours and put his head on the floor over an undelivered catalog, you'd make sure flawless customer service was routine, too!


*Note the Japanglish: I'm thinking this Patagonia manager had a translation dictionary handy as he wrote Chouinard this letter. As a former English teacher, I can verify its authenticity. Like Chouinard, I love the Japanese!